Art Essay: Annual College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles
By Gail Levin ©2018
arttimesjournal May 11, 2018
The annual College Art Association met this year in Los Angeles: excellent chance for the visual arts crowd to take in what the city has to offer, dispersed though much of it lies beyond the easy public transportation that one takes for granted in New York, yet enough within reach to keep one busy for a few days.
Having decided to go, I submitted a paper which was accepted for what would prove to be a fascinating double panel. Flying to the West Coast from New York in February, I found that Los Angeles was having a cold snap, so that temperatures were warmer in New York. Nonetheless, walking from a city bus to the L.A. County Museum (LACMA), I passed huge beds of spectacular succulents like aloe, blooming outdoors in well-tended gardens in front of small bungalows: charming outdoor “desert” landscapes impossible in Manhattan.
Much of LACMA was closed before major construction, yet there was enough to make the trek there worthwhile. A show of Spanish colonial paintings from Mexico complemented fascinating exhibits about Mexican influence in Southern California. I could rush through a show of the contemporary appropriator, Richard Prince, already sufficiently seen on the East Coast.
I was lucky enough to attend a nighttime reception at the Getty, which allowed me to fit in looking at art without missing any of the sessions that I wanted to attend. The Getty provided refreshments and the opportunity to tour the entire museum, though the evening hour precluded visiting the spectacular garden. The Getty, for all its funding and good will, has not yet figured out how to display even a modicum of charm. It lacks what old East Coast museums just naturally have. As we ran from building to building in the chilly weather, we regretted having checked our coats at the start; and we found that the museum had just closed some shows, and had not yet opened others. One might have thought that with such a large, specialized audience for art in town that they might have coordinated their exhibition dates with the College Art Association.
Our CAA panel, “Art, Agency, and the Making of Identities at a Global Level 1600-2000,” was very well organized by Noémie Etienne of Bern University in Switzerland and Yaelle Biro, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The roster of talks ranged from European Decoration at the Qing Court in Peking to a consideration of Moroccan modernisms at the Art Deco Exposition in 1925 Paris. My talk, “Frida Kahlo’s Invention of Jewish Identity,” argued that Kahlo fabricated the story that her German immigrant father was Jewish. I discussed how and why she created this fictive identity; and I surveyed how the invention got disseminated and has so far been only partially debunked. For example, the week prior to leaving for CAA, I saw at the Museum of Modern Art, Frida’s 1936 painting, My Grandparents, My Parents and I, with an extensive wall text that reiterated the misrepresentation of Frida’s ethnicity by the Jewish Museum in 2003. With my cell phone I photographed the text and added it in my paper, amazed that since 2005, no one at MoMA had picked up on the Germans’ exposing Frida’s pretense.
Since my return to New York, a young scholar whom I did not know stopped me at an art opening to say that she heard and liked my paper. Even more surprising, a few weeks later when I again went to MoMA, Frida’s painting was still on view, but the debunked text was gone, suggesting that my paper had had an effect. That’s reason enough to speak at a conference: people do listen, institutions can be moved, wall texts removed.
The conference was also a great way to learn about my current interest, Asian art, now something of an obsession since I am currently teaching a survey of Asian art for the first time. Perhaps because of the West Coast venue, there were many more complete sessions on Asian art than one person could attend, as well as additional Asian topics in mixed global sessions. Some of the sessions focused specifically on Asia included: “Viral Media and South Asia;” “Changing Interactions: Japanese Artists and the West Coast (a double session);” “Localizing History through Donor Portraits: Images of Donors and Ritual Scenes in Early Medieval South Asia”; “Faithful Copies: On Replication and Creative Agency in Buddhist Art” (a double session); “Art Historical Ecology: Asian Perspectives;” “Calligraphy’s Visuality in China;” “International Art Exhibitions of the 1980s: The Festivals of India;” “The ‘Three Empires’ Redux: Islamic Interregionality in the Age of Modernity;” ”Between Nation-‘ness’ and National ‘less’ in Postwar Asia;” and “Reorganizing the Art World: Postwar and Contemporary Collectives in Asia.”
I was also pleased with some of the papers presented on American, modern, and contemporary art. A panel on the “American Midwest: Rethinking Modernism” treated neglected topics, including one on the 20th century modernist critic, C. J. Bulliet, who worked in Chicago, and one on Chicago Imagism, interpreted as a diversion from mainstream modernism.
The Women’s Caucus for Art, an affiliated group that gathers at the CAA, offered a marvelous film, Gloria’s Call, directed by Cheri Gauke, about the veteran feminist art historian, Gloria Orenstein’s lifelong journey to pursue the Surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington. This artist-designed film (Cheryl Bookout, Anne Gauldin, Sue Maberry and Christine Papalexis) uses art, animation and storytelling to present a fascinating view of art, ecofeminism, and shamanism.
The lure of seeing original art in museums, however, compelled me to take time off to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art and the newer Broad Museum. MoCA had not changed much since my last visit. The Panza Collection was still on view with many important works by familiar artists such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Chamberlain.
In contrast to MoCA, the newer Broad Museum offered many pleasures in contemporary art, some not so easily available on a regular basis in museums in New York. I enjoyed the large-scale cartoonish painting of the Japanese Takashi Murakami and a splendid huge hanging piece called Red Block (2010) made of conic "bottle-tops" by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist who lives in Nigeria. My favorites, however, were all works by women artists: a densely layered abstract painting by Julie Mehretu, outsized hyperrealistic figures by Jenny Saville, a dark enigmatic figurative work by Cecily Brown, and Kara Walker’s powerful narrative in silhouette cut-outs.
Despite the attraction of the museums, I was at CAA to take advantage of learning from the sessions. I was solicited and agreed to attend a publisher’s focus group, held very early one morning. The purpose was to introduce faculty to an online art history survey textbook and related features. Several of the speakers had helped develop and now use this new online text platform. I was initially disappointed because the particular book featured was not aimed at global survey, which I have been teaching since the early 1990s, in order to match my course material to CUNY’s diverse student population. Although the featured text focused almost entirely on Western European art, it was so off-putting that I had no regrets that it would not fit my global survey.
The whole session made me feel like a canary in a coal mine, doomed to sound an early warning of what has just arrived and its potential negative impact on teaching, scholarship, and students. For students, the advertised novelty promises books with an audio feature to which students can listen, while they follow along and look at the pictures. Or they can fold their laundry while listening… It’s a virtual lecture, so we heard that professors no longer need to present the basics in class, because they already are accessible online! Instead, discussions in class can be on anything: extra little chats on any subject. At the same time, professors can monitor online how many minutes each student has spent listening to the textbook. How awesome to turn professors into a kind of robot thought-police able to check up on student behavior outside of the classroom!
I can easily imagine that universities funded by state legislatures would soon figure out how to achieve cost savings by having just one or two professors give lectures online with machine-graded exams, or essays outsourced for grading. Aside from the fact that this new passive process won’t help most students learn anything, it will mean the end of the professor as teacher and research scholar. Positions for art historians in the academy will go the way of travel agents.
But what will this mean for students? Many, who grew up writing on computers, have already lost the ability to write in cursive script. Some can barely take notes by hand or produce legible handwriting at all. Now they can forget how to read and just learn to listen and look at pictures. Even honors students have informed me recently that they only want read what they can have on their phones. Thus, I am now warning my students of the peril of forgetting how to read and write, or how to speak out. This new online teaching has the potential to turn students into near-automatons, who can then be programed by robots. We are already hearing about implanting digital devices into human beings for diverse purposes. Isn’t this new online teaching very appropriate for use by any regime that practices thought control?
I must be old fashioned and I am based in New York, where we have world-class art museums. I believe that we can best teach students in person and that they need to practice speaking and writing as essential components for learning. I prefer that students studying art have some experience looking at art in person-- in museums, in galleries, or in artists’ studios. I don’t mean to eliminate digital art, which is a relatively new and original art form, but I am not so thrilled with a steady diet of online reproductions of other artworks. In this age of virtual everything, we already have the direct result of an overabundance of reproductions online: more and more art forgeries and the inability of many to tell the difference between authentic and fake. I hope that the CAA will strongly support looking at actual art works. And we really do need to preserve teaching the old-fashioned way: in person. I am sorry I feel compelled to sound this warning, but I hope it’s not too late to save our profession.
Gail Levin writes artists' biographies, art history, and fiction; curates exhibitions; and exhibits her own art. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Levin is now Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women's Studies at The Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York.